Robbie Birkner’s Blog

Archive for May, 2012

HEXONET has been growing! It has been an amazing journey the past couple of years and we are ecstatic to announce that we are now managing over a million domains for clients, resellers and partners. The one million domain milestone is a goal that many registrars strive for and HEXONET reached this goal in mid-April of 2012!

First and Foremost – Thank You:

The executives at HEXONET would like to thank our amazing team in Germany and Canada. They are “HEXONET” and without their efforts and commitment, HEXONET would never have been able to achieve this milestone so quickly.

To our loyal customers, resellers, and partners, we are extremely grateful that you have decided to stand with HEXONET. Without your support and all your constant feedback (both good and bad), we could not be the company we are today. Our promise is to stay humble, continue to listen, and work everyday to be better for you. Again, many thanks.

A Hard Journey to 1 Million Domains:

1. Like any expanding company we have seen growing pains when it came to our employees. Looking back on both the good and the bad, HEXONET has definitely seen the benefit of bringing in new ideas and minds into our organization. New blood in the company exposed areas we were weak and helped us identify where we could improve. Today the team is as talented and as strong as ever. And we are now looking to add even more amazing people to our team. Many lessons learned and many issues overcome.

2. Handling security as we grow has been a challenge, but we are on top of it. Our biggest attack was about a year ago when HEXONET was hit with a massive DDOS. The attack was on a unprecedented scale with over 2 million queries per second on all our servers generating over 80 Gbits of bandwidth. This DDOS even saturated our upstream provider’s datacenter, one of Europe’s largest Internet hubs. We are happy to announce that through proactive measures and procedures no DDOS attacks has affected HEXONET since this last incident.

Many Successes Along the Way:

1. Our reseller and partner network is growing exponentially. Hosting companies, registrar service providers, domain resellers, domainers, and small businesses are now realizing the strength of HEXONET’s advanced and PROVEN technology platform. In our opinion, for TLDs and especially ccTLDs, no other platform or service compares.

More than a decade ago, nearly all companies designed their systems for a handful of dominant TLDs (COM/NET), HEXONET on the contrary believed that eventually hundreds if not thousands of TLDs would be the norm. So today, while others struggle and even hack every new TLD into their in-congruent systems, HEXONET seamlessly adds new TLDs, as our platform was designed to scale from the very beginning. Even more important is the many years of engineering and operational knowledge held by our staff and engineers. We can answer questions about the smallest operational and architectural nuisances for TLDs, a skill that only reveals itself when working with a registry system for years and years.

2. Our Registrar Operations Center platform (RegistrarOC), has also been garnering a lot of interest as well as clients among large corporate customers. These clients with their own accreditations and a large number of domains now realize that there is a huge cost (time and salaries) to update and maintain their own registrar platform. This is where RegistrarOC steps in and not only saves these companies money, but eliminates a huge operational and engineering burden. Interestingly enough, prominent law firms are now becoming ICANN accredited to manage their clients domains. Since law firms are typically not technical, many have turned to RegistrarOC and HEXONET to manage their accreditations.

3. With HEXONET’s platforms gaining popularity, many newTLDs have even come to us asking for help with running a house registrar of their own. As a result, some .BRAND TLDs have committed to running their own house registrar service through 1API (HEXONET’s house registrar) or through utilizing RegistrarOC.
The Journey Continues – What to Expect:

1. A new and more friendly website launching this summer.

2. A newer and easier to use “orderform” to be progressively released throughout the year. With each release new features will be available for clients.

3. More Control Panel enhancements and upgrades. All these updates are from direct feedback and requests from our clients. Some cool new bulk management features are coming!

4. General public “Domain for Sale” listing service on HEXONET’s domain auction platform PremiumSale.com. The site and auction service at PremiumSale.com has received tremendous feedback and now we are going to opening it up for members to auction off their own domains through the platform.

Even though we surpassed the 1 million domain goal for the company, we are not resting. HEXONET continues to work hard for our customers. Again to all our customers, resellers, and partners, thank you for your support and patronage.